


all the things come back to you

by Kam_fr



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, human dissection (not detailed)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 02:47:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4860095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kam_fr/pseuds/Kam_fr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt hungers for Hermann's brain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all the things come back to you

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dream On by Aerosmith, which for some mysterious reason I associate with Pacific Rim and its two adorable scientists.  
> This work is unbetaed and wasn't written by a native English speaker, so it may contains errors and odd turns of phrase. I'd be very grateful if you could point them to me.

The truth is, Newt never expected them to be Drift Compatible.

It still bowls him over at odd moments, how _wrong_ he was.

He remembers it as if it was preserved in formaldehyde. That exact moment, fixed forever, crisp and detailed: standing in a grimy street, a giant beast leaking guts and acid blood before him, holding a Drift interface made out of garbage, like the most extreme ever stereotype of a DIY experiment. The memories of the previous drift like a nebulous toxic cloud in the back of his mind, formless and only half understood but overwhelming in his alienness, the fear that’s enough to make his body shake but not to stop him, oh god, someone please stop him. In a second he will sink the electrode in kaiju brain and drift with it and save the world, it is ineluctable because he has made it so, and he will not let the opportunity pass, he is a rockstar and he always knew he would go out in a blaze of glory (a powerless whisper: but he doesn’t want to die).

_“I’ll go with you.”_

If he’d been thinking, he wouldn’t have agreed. Because of course they weren’t compatible. Compatible was normalizing neural patterns by common ground, was worldview and thought processes similar enough to roughly overlap when forced in synchronicity. There was nothing compatible about Hermann and him, god, _they were the very definition of incompatibility_. They should have entered the drift paralyzed by mental dissonance, incapable of conciliating contrary impulses to form a coherent course of action, mindless and vulnerable to the influence of the anteverse’s hivemind and basically doomed (and the world with them).

But he hadn’t been thinking. All rational thoughts drowned under the relief, the wonder of Hermann finding that perfect solution, the miraculous third proposition in a binary catch-22 situation: _I have to face it but I don’t have to face it alone_.

It shouldn’t have worked.

And yet.

 

His mind comes back to it over and over, during the celebration, in the lab tying up loose ends on almost a decade of research, in his quarters trying to decide where to go from here. He thinks around it, like scratching the periphery of an itch, like a moth drawn to a flame, like a satellite caught in a planet’s gravitational pull.

It was _glorious_.

 

It all comes back to this: it shouldn’t have worked. It should have been a disaster of the unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object variety. Newt tearing himself open on sharp steel corners, Hermann recoiling in horror from the sheer mess.

But Newt was wrong. So, so wrong.

Because Hermann doesn’t flee from chaos. Hermann’s whole goddamn work is staring chaos in the face, and modelling it. Outlining its patterns with pretty chalk white equations on a black board.

 

It was all so fast.

 

So _efficient_.

 

Newt’s impetus gently corralled, steered to focus on only one objective, his intuitive thinking and innate empathy used to orient them in the hivemind’s memories but always with a clear separation of _us versus them_ traced in Hermann’s handwriting ; Newt’s leaps of logic guiding Hermann’s more thorough analysis ; their melted minds the steel of a gleaming blade cutting through the deafening shrieks of the hivemind.

It had lasted maybe thirty seconds. Thirty terrifying, glorious, too short seconds.

 

Newt’s recollection of his second drift might not be totally accurate. It might have been slightly altered and romanticized during his subsequent recountings of the event.

During the drift, he was too focused on _how to close the rift_ with an undercurrent of _and save the world, baby_ to wax lyrical about the experience.

It didn’t happen immediately after either, not when he was reeling from triumph and relief, the sudden absence of any oppressive presence against his thoughts leaving him light-headed.

Newt can with reasonable certainty situate it sometimes between the closure of the rift and the celebrations, this cartoonish double-take moment of _wait, was that really me and Hermann ?_

 _Me_ and _Hermann_ ?

Huh. Didn’t see that one coming.

Kinda hot.

 

The Shatterdome is scheduled to be dismantled in a month. Not much time to put the finishing touch on nearly ten years of work, so Hermann and Newt are rather busy. At least there isn’t that much material to pack ; maybe the only upside of the continual budget cuts they had to endure in the last years. It suits Newt, who doesn’t particularly wants to think about what comes after. For now, they’re in their lab with its stark black line on the floor, Hermann running a few last calculations on his bulky computer, Newt establishing a primary culture out of a piece of lung from Raiju, whose corpse was brought back from the rift by Gipsy Danger a few days ago, and trying not to daydream about being software.

It could be nice. Just executing algorithms, no uncertainty about the future as an obsolete rockstar, Hermann setting up parameters and defining acceptable ranges and Newt running simulations for him.

Maybe a bit boring, though.

 

He comes across his trusty makeshift neural bridge while packing and hesitates.

It’s too voluminous to move easily.

And he doesn’t have permission for any subsequent drifting with dead Kaiju tissue (he’s asked).

Still.

He finally decides to leave it behind.

He can always make another.

 

The lab is emptier every day, and the atmosphere strangely subdued, even their arguments feel purely perfunctory. It makes it more difficult for Newt to ignore their imminent departure. He still doesn’t know where to go, hasn’t searched really. He could go anywhere, universities would fall over themselves to welcome him.

He could wring the last secrets out of the few specimens left at his disposal, before public interest wanes and Kaijus are slowly forgotten, become nothing more than an odd and dramatic detour in Earth’s history.

He could go back to tissue regeneration.

He could commit suicide after a final drift with a Kaiju brain under the influence of hallucinogenic substances. Very rockstar, that.

He could change fields totally, maybe do another PhD, is that allowed ? In physics or mathematics, maybe not quantum theory because he wouldn’t want to encroach on Hermann’s turf, but something with models and numbers. He finds them soothing.

Biomathematics, maybe.

 

Newt is lying on an operation table, front open cleanly from the pelvis to the throat. A few feet from him, Hermann is writing equations on his blackboard, his forearms gleaming red from having been buried in Newt’s guts. When he finishes, he brushes the symbols with the tip of a bloody finger, and Newt feels his touch along his spinal column.

He wakes up in a white-hot blaze, to a dark room and sticky sheets.

 

So Newt has a bit of a _thing_ about mind-melding with Hermann.

It isn’t even that surprising, considering that upon watching Trespasser’s attack on San Francisco, one of his first impulses was to immortalise the beast’s cataclysmic strength on his own unimpressive biceps.

He probably shouldn’t tattoo Hermann’s brain on his head.

He would have to shave it, and bald is not a good look for him.

 

Twenty days after Newt’s second drift, when he enters their shared lab, Hermann’s eyes land on Newt’s forehead, just below the hairline, and his eyebrows shoot up in surprise:  
\- Is that my abridged formula for determining the radius of the quantum rift ?  
Newt shrugs and pass a finger on the raised skin somewhat self-consciously :  
\- Just felt like it, I guess.


End file.
